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Politicos And The Poison Ivy Poll Narrative

The howitzers of the hustings have
boomed and bottomed out. The outcome has exultant victors celebrating and the
vanquished in sullen silence.

As the dust settles and new governments go to
work in Uttar Pradesh, Punjab, Uttarakhand, Goa and Manipur it is time to look
back and ponder. Was it at all necessary for the exalted political leadership
of an emerging India to sully public discourse to such putrid levels as
happened in these elections?

A cost-benefit analysis will show
there were actually no winners even if the BJP beat competition by a mile in UP
and Uttarakhand and the Congress snatched Punjab from the Akali-BJP combine
only to be pipped to the post in Manipur and Goa despite being the single
largest party. It is not only that when you cheat the mandate through
questionable methods you lower the bar a wee bit more for the next contest but
also that when pollside discourse goes gutter low, political pollution only
sinks to subterranean levels. Gujarat, next in line, is already warming up to
it.

A gracious prime minister rightly
earmarked a Rs 20,000 crore programme for cleaning the river Ganga over 5 years
and Rs 20,011 crores in union budget 2017 for ‘Swachh Bharat’. And then, without batting an eyelid ,waded into the
verbal muck of electioneering in a ‘give and take’ that hardly does justice to
his position either as the repository of the modern nor heir of the ancient .

Does it behove prime minister Modi to
target ex-prime minister Manmohan Singh
in the Rajya Sabha on February 8,2017 stating ”Only Dr(Manmohan)knows the art
of taking bath wearing a raincoat”?.Maybe there was nothing unparliamentary
about it .May be it was meant to serve
only short term goals like the targeting of
muslims did during his infamous
2002 “Miya Musharraf” speeches on his ‘gaurav yatra’ taken out in
Gujarat in the aftermath of the statewide communal riots that followed the
Godhra train carnage. Cut to Solapur , Maharashtra in April 2004 during an
election campaign with the Gujarat chief minister (Modi) terming Congress president
Sonia Gandhi as a ‘jersey cow’ and Rahul Gandhi as her ‘hybrid
bachhda’(calf).This when I have often heard BJP bigwigs harping on the values
of ‘sabhyta, suchita aur samrasta’ (decency,cleanliness
and politeness).

The horrifying, targeted trolling of a 20 year old Kargil
matryr’s daughter,Gurmehar Kaur including threats of rape for criticizing ABVP
is an example of how the innocent are exemplified to build poll atmospherics in the age of
social media. Corraborations come from union minister Kiran Rijjiju’s fast paced reaction and BJP MP Pratap Simha
comparing her to Dawood Ibrahim.

What it unleashed this election was a
welter of reposte. When public discourse of the high and mighty enters the
bathroom in a shower of unsavoury
utterances the only outlet is a flush of political excreta or a clogged drain
that throws back the dirt.

And that is exactly what happened, particularly
in UP. Each gave as good as he got. Neither the then Samajwadi party chief
minister Akhilesh Yadav nor alliance partner Rahul Gandhi of the Congress or
Mayawati of the BSP were prepared to step back. Lesser minions were more
garrulous and utterances slipped from the asinine to the abhorrent.

Shah had his
own take referring to the urgent need to get rid of ‘kasab’ from UP, a word
rendered notorious as the name of a Pakistani terrorist who was hanged in
India. Shah clarified here it stood for Congress,Samajwadi and BSP inviting a
retort from Akhilesh that ‘ka’ actually stood for’kabootar’, the BJP pigeons
set for release post-elections. Prime minister Modi alluded to SCAM (Samajwadi,
Congress, Akhilesh and Mayawati) which UP needed to be saved from. Akhilesh, however,
felt it stood for ‘Saving the Country
from Amit Shah and Modi’ while Rahul Gandhi interpreted it as ‘Seva, Courage, Ability
and Modesty’.

BJP, UP chief Keshav Prasad Maurya who had switched sides from
the BSP before the polls had no hesitation in calling his old party
‘naag’(cobra) and the SP and Congress as
‘saap’(snake) and ‘black cobra’ respectively. Others brought in the
monkey as well. Should the national head of a ruling party be invoking a
terrorist, even if as an acronym ,to target political entities ?Is this the
‘sanskar’ that the top political leadership of the country seeks to impart?

Then there was communal cleaving as a
conscious election strategy. Prime minister Modi speaking at a rally in
Fatehpur (February 19,2017 said that the government was biased.”If a village gets a graveyard, it
should get a cremation ground too. If there is electricity during ramzan, there
should be electricity during diwali too”.. and so it went on. Nothing wrong as
such. Only that he was alluding to muslim appeasement by the Akhilesh
government as he had done during the Bihar elections (Buxar October 26,2015)
when he said” the grand alliance leaders are conspiring to take away 5 per cent from the dalits, mahadalits, backwards
and give it to particular religious groups….I will not allow such a plot to
succeed even if it involves sacrificing my life”.Again,the reference was
obviously to the minority.BJP MP Sakshi Maharaj went a step further when he
said on February 28 at lucknow that muslims should be cremated as there was no
space to bury 20 crore people. He was alluding to the muslim population in the
country. Yogi Adityanath (now chief minister of UP) speaking on January 31 at
Bulandshahr asked voters to remember the riots and rapes when they went out to
vote.

Polarisation efforts also saw
counter-polarisation moves in the UP polls. There was R.Javed of the RLD quoted
as stating that the muslims are suffering because of creation of Pakistan, otherwise
there would have been 50 crore more muslims in India and consequently more
administrators from the community and BSP’s Haji Yaqub Qureshi saying that
muslims would lose their voting rights if the BJP came to power.

Time for the political class to pause
and ponder as to where the poll narrative is headed . The unquenchable thirst
for power at all costs is cleaving communities-even the majority
community-,fraying the national fabric itself.

The irony is that the inmates of
our political zoo-like showcase, in their mutual name-calling, are now defaming
wild life as well !

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R.K. Misra is a field journalist with over forty years of experience working for some of the top news publications in India and abroad. Presently the Roving editor of The Free Press Journal of Mumbai, he is also the State Correspondent of the New York based international news agency, Associated Press (AP), news dailies Hitavada of Nagpur, Daily Post of Chandigarh and Outlook magazine of Delhi , to name a few. Beginning his professional career with The Times of India in Ahmedabad, he has worked as Senior Assistant Editor with Probe India and it’s sister hindi publication ‘Maya’ in Delhi and as Special Correspondent and later Roving Editor of The Pioneer and the Indo-Asian News Service (IANS). Specialising in cross-country coverage of conflict areas like Punjab and Kashmir at the height of militancy , he has also done stints for the Gulf News of Dubai and the Arab News of Saudi Arabia besides the Tribune of Chandigarh, and Vijay Times of Bangalore. His specialization, however remains, Gujarat. He is presently based in Gandhinagar, the state capital of Gujarat.